From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2008-04-09T02:35:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's not ready - an indepth essay

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Austin Ziegler wrote:
| On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:05 AM, Phillip Gawlowski
| <cmdjackryan@googlemail.com> wrote:
|>  Austin Ziegler wrote:
|>  | (Yes, Virginia. Most people don't need full-on Unicode munging in
|>  | their code. It's necessary when you do need it, but most people don't
|>  | need it.)
|>  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
|>
|>  I need it. Most of Europe needs it. Not to mention Arabia, Japan, and
|>  everybody else not speaking English.
|
| You didn't read what I said. I said "most people don't need full-on
| Unicode munging." This is true. There are some cases where it's
| absolutely necessary, but most people just need to know that they're
| not going to screw up things when they work with Unicode.

Without Unicode support, a string operation in a non-English alphabet
will work as expected. Any language with more characters in the alphabet
that English, needs full Unicode support.

|
| You can write Unicode-safe applications without needing full Unicode
| string munging. Easily. Most Rails apps should probably be doing
| exactly that.

Without Unicode support, you can't be Unicode safe. That's a tautology.

Also: Rails rolls its own Unicode support.

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan

~ - You know you've been hacking too long when...
...you are looking at an ASCII core dump of your OS project which has many
O's and &'s in it (among other things), and you shout:
"I see the problem.  Orcs are attacking my demons."
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